MTFCA Forum

Last picture of the ‘13 runabout is most interesting to me. Owner has made many ‘updates’. Electric headlights, later (‘15-‘16) rear fenders and he doesn’t need any old fashioned kerosene cowl lamps

I hope he had a tire pump.

Never get tired of your pictures of these hardy people in their Model T's in period settings! Thanks & keep up the good work! Ray

That first picture of the speedster. It looks like it must have a longer steering column? Maybe not, because the cowl comes right up to the back of the wheel and on a stock car there is a longer space from the firewall. You can't see the firewall on the speedster, but the brake lever seems to be in the right relationship to the steering wheel.
Norm

The fairgrounds racers were going too fast for the shutter speed on the camera!

I wonder what kind of body is on the 8th car. The one with the boy on the fender. The fender looks like somewhere around 1925 T and so does the chassis and lights, however the body hood and radiator looks like something else.
Norm

Norman K et al,
A.B.C. and Autowa were just two of the several companies that supplied fancier roadster and touring car bodies for the model T chassis. Whether this one is one of those two or one of the others I don't know. However it likely was one of the several upscale roadster after-market bodies. A really nice car at that!

Herb I et al,
The fairgrounds racers are a great photo! The leaning effect of the close racers was due to a flat plane shutter. A flat plane shutter exposes the film in a sweeping motion. This causes a moving object to get its "picture taken" at slightly different times for different parts of the picture. That slightly "different time" allows the car to be in a slightly different place at the moment that part of the photo is taken. Depending upon which way the camera is held, the sweeping motion is either up/down or side/side. Most flat plane shutters work bidirectionally. If the previous photo went from top to bottom, the next one will go bottom to top. THAT determines whether a car will lean forward or backward! We usually see photos of racing cars leaning forward, although I have seen quite a few that were leaning back. I "suspect" that photographers preferred the leaning forward effect, and therefore either "gamed" the camera to get that effect, or simply trashed the photos they didn't like so much.
The blurry effect is due to the slow speed of the film. Higher speed films were available, but expensive. Professional sports photographers often used the higher speed films in order to get more spectacular (and therefore more valuable!) photos. Most people did not use higher speed films in those days. The closeness and relative angle of motion cause the nearby cars to be more blurry than the cars farther back.

Film of course continued to improve up until digital cameras became practical. In the 1950s and 1960s, everyday film was nearly as fast as the best any professional could buy in 1920. Some digital cameras in the recent twenty years can "stop" an airplane propeller spinning under full power! (The silly thing is that they cannot focus on relatively slowly moving fast moving water!?)

Tom, I always appreciate your pictures, these were even more outstanding than usual, sorry, I'm out of adjectives. Speedster fan in Washington, Dave

Same Tom, thank you for posting. Wayne, thank you for the camera/shutter/film speed explanations.

I sure learn a lot here. Now, if I could only remember it….

These are some of my favorite threads, I love looking at the old pictures, and trying to imagine like back then, after I like reading the posts discussing the details. I've learned so much.

In the fairgrounds racing picture, it looks like they just came out of a curve as you can see a bend in the inside wood railing on the extreme right. The main car appears to be skidding as you can see that his rear wheels are not lined up with his front wheels. The front wheel seems to be digging up some dirt as well. The driver behind him looks like he's either leaning left (as he would be in a left curve) or just watching out for a potential crash. Some in the stands are also leaning to see what's happening. Very interesting. There is a very famous photo of a car of this period showing the wheels leaning forward. It's a side shot and is in many books, but I can't find it right now. Someone here will probably dig it up.
John

"Owner has made many ‘updates’. Electric headlights, later (‘15-‘16) rear fenders and he doesn’t need any old fashioned kerosene cowl lamps "

It also has shocks, both front and rear. I hope that's his mom, and not his wife...